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Across Sweden, around seventy automotive mechanics persist to challenge among the globe's wealthiest corporations – the electric vehicle manufacturer. This industrial action targeting the American carmaker's ten Swedish service centers has currently reached its second anniversary, with little sign of a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been at the Tesla picket line since October 2023.

"It's a tough period," states the 39-year-old. With Sweden's cold winter weather arrives, it's likely to grow even tougher.

Janis spends each Monday alongside a fellow worker, positioned outside a Tesla service center within a business district in Malmö. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies shelter via a mobile builders' van, as well as coffee and light meals.

But it remains operations continue normally across the road, at which the service facility appears to be in full swing.

This industrial action involves an issue that goes to the heart of Scandinavia's industrial culture – the right of trade unions to bargain for wages and conditions on behalf of their workforce. This concept of collective agreement has underpinned industrial relations across the nation for almost one hundred years.

Currently approximately 70% of Swedish workers belong of a trade union, and ninety percent are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes across the nation occur infrequently.

This is an arrangement supported across the board. "We prefer the right to bargain directly with the unions and sign collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise employer group.

However Tesla has upset the apple cart. Vocal CEO the company leader has stated he "opposes" with the idea of labor organizations. "I simply disapprove of any arrangement that establishes a sort of lords and peasants situation," he informed listeners at an event last year. "In my view the unions attempt to generate negativity in a company."

Tesla entered Sweden back in 2014, while the metalworkers' union has for years sought to establish a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they did not reply," states the union president, the union's president. "We formed the impression that they tried to hide away or not discuss this with us."

She says the organization eventually found no other option than to call a strike, which started in late October, last year. "Usually the threat suffices to make the threat," says the union leader. "Employers typically agrees to the contract."

But this did not happen on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, originally from Latvia, started working with the automaker in 2021. He asserts that pay and conditions frequently dependent on the whim of supervisors.

He recalls an evaluation meeting at which he says he was refused a salary increase because that he "not reaching company targets". Meanwhile, a colleague was said to be rejected for a pay rise because he had an "inappropriate demeanor".

However, not everyone participated in the industrial action. The company employed some 130 technicians working at the time the strike was initiated. The union states currently approximately 70 of its members are participating in the action.

The automaker has long since substituted these with new workers, for which that has not occurred since the era of the Great Depression.

"The company has done it [found replacement staff] openly & systematically," says German Bender, a researcher at Arena Idé, a policy organization supported by Swedish trade unions.

"It is not against the law, which is important to understand. However it violates all traditional norms. Yet Tesla shows no concern for conventions.

"They want to become norm breakers. Thus when anyone informs them, listen, you are violating a standard, they perceive this as praise."

The company's local division declined requests for comment via correspondence citing "all-time high vehicle shipments".

Indeed, the automaker has granted just a single press discussion during the entire period since the strike began.

Earlier this year, the local division's "national manager, Jens Stark, informed a business paper that it suited the organization better to avoid a collective agreement, and rather "to work closely with the team and provide workers optimal conditions".

The executive denied that the choice not to enter a labor contract was determined at Tesla headquarters overseas. "We have a mandate to make independent such decisions," he stated.

The union is not entirely isolated in its fight. The strike has been supported by a number of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in nearby Scandinavian nations, Norway & Finland, decline to process Teslas; waste is no longer removed from Tesla's Swedish facilities; while newly built power points are not being linked to power networks in the country.

There is one such facility near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, where 20 chargers stand idle. But a Tesla enthusiast, the president of enthusiasts group the Swedish Tesla association, states vehicle owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There exists an alternative power point 10km from here," he says. "Plus we are able to continue to purchase vehicles, we can service our vehicles, we can power our electric cars."

With stakes high for all parties, it's hard to see a resolution to the stand-off. The union faces the danger of setting a precedent should it surrender the fundamental concept of collective agreement.

"The concern is how this could expand," says the researcher, "and eventually {erode